Clinton Cabinet Secretary Says Folks Who
Disagree With Him Are "Un-American"

Speaking on a taxpayer-supported radio station, U.S. Secretary
of the Interior Bruce Babbitt made the extremist claim on July
21, 1997 that disagreeing with his views on climate change issues
is "un-American in the most basic sense." What's more,
Babbitt says, for an American to even work with scientists to
investigate the scientific issues involving climate change is
joining in "a conspiracy... to deny the facts."

Apparently, Secretary Babbitt believes that all scientists,
and all Americans, should let the government do all their investigating,
and all their thinking, for them.

But believing something just because the government says it
is true is the antithesis of the scientific method. And it's something
scientists haven't thought well of since the time of Galileo,
if not before.

To set the facts straight: it is, at the very least, an open
question as to whether or not global warming is occurring, and,
even if so, to what extent human actions are having an impact
on the global climate. It is also far from settled whether or
not humankind would benefit from global warming if it is occurring.

To our way of thinking, when one doesn't know the answer to something,
the best thing to do is: investigate it.

And since, as readers will see in the transcript below, Secretary
Babbitt believes that the only reason anyone disagrees with his
view on climate issues is because oil and coal companies paid
them to, we'll voluntarily state for the record: The National
Center for Public Policy Research (the sponsors of this web site
and of the Environmental Policy Task Force) has never received
a penny from any oil or coal company. Nor have we received any
money, nor any gifts in-kind, from anyone who has attempted to
tell us what our views on climate change should be.

(And by the way: The Clinton Administration cannot honestly
claim that no group with a set view on climate change provided
major help to Democrats in the 1996 election year -- and we do
mean major help. So if anyone's getting paid for an opinion...)

Transcript

Diane Rehm Show
National Public Radio's WAMU-FM, based in Washington, D.C.
July 21, 1997

Caller's question:

...Why can't we begin to increase tax on gasoline to diminish
its use and to provide a revenue to develop alternative resources...

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt:

Let me suggest that we have a really big opportunity coming
up this year, in 1997. Climate change is underway. We have already
changed the atmosphere through fossil fuel emissions. That's a
scientific fact beyond denial. The effects are starting to show
up. And there's going to be a treaty negotiation in Kyoto, in
Japan, at the end of this year to try to set national plans to
control global warming.

But its an unhappy fact that the oil companies and the coal
companies in the United States have joined in a conspiracy to
hire pseudo scientists to deny the facts, and then begin raising
political arguments that are essentially fraudulent, that we can
so this with the economy, the same kind of arguments they used
against acid rain, they used against the Clean Air Act, the Clean
Water Act. This time I think its especially unfortunate, and I
think that the energy companies need to be called to account because
what they are doing is un-American in the most basic sense. They
are compromising our future by misrepresenting facts by suborning
scientists onto their payrolls and attempting to mislead the American
people.

Host Diane Rehm:

And keeping the issue alive. I mean keeping the question as
to whether climate change is actually occurring, keeping the question
in people's mind's [unclear] it's supposed to, assuming there
is something happening.

Secretary Babbitt:

That's absolutely true. There was an article by the president
of Chrysler Corporation in The Washington Post last week. It's
an outrageous distortion of existing science that is reflective
of what's going on in the energy industry. And I don't think its
too strong to say that it is a deliberate attempt to distort the
facts and to mislead and to simply stall any kind of progress
for their own short term, advantage with possibly really catastrophic
effects in the long run.

Rehm:

Have you written response?

Babbitt:

Well, I hadn't thought about it till just now. Sort of getting
sufficiently worked up about this. I just might do that.